Just when we thought that at long last we wouldn’t have Al Gore to kick around any more, he resurfaces with a characteristically pretentious, apocalyptic New York Times op-ed [Feb. 27] about global warming, “an unimaginable calamity requiring large-scale, preventive measures to protect human civilization as we know it.”

How awful a calamity? “The displacement of hundreds of millions of climate refugees, civil unrest, chaos and the collapse of governance in many developing countries, large-scale crop failures and the spread of deadly diseases.” Sounds almost as bad as a Gore presidency.

Assuming for the sake of argument that the Earth is, indeed, warming and even that it’s due to human activities, any significant lowering of emissions will be too costly, too little and too late.

Reductions in the burning of fossil fuels large enough to have even a modest impact would stifle economic growth and plunge the world into the kind of chaos that Gore predicts. In any case, discernible effects on warming would be decades away. Actions to reduce emissions should only be undertaken if they’re likely to be cost-effective and if they have desirable secondary effects as well; an example would be a significant shift from fossil fuels to nuclear power. (Nuclear power is conspicuously absent from Gore’s new op-ed and all his perorations about global warming.)

Often it’s wiser to try to adapt to or mitigate a problem than to try to remove its causes. Consider, for example, the solution that the U.K. adopted to prevent the flooding of London by surge tides that occur under certain meteorological conditions and because tide levels have been rising two feet per century. Rather than trying to eliminate the source of these tides, from 1974-84 the U.K. constructed the Thames Barrier, an innovative monumental system of movable floodgates that prevents the flooding.

Similarly, in the short term, we should focus our efforts and resources on becoming more resilient and adaptive. A perceptive article in the journal Nature by University of Colorado environmental studies professor Roger Pielke Jr. and his collaborators pointed out that “vulnerability to climate-related impacts on society is increasing for reasons that have nothing to do with greenhouse-gas emissions, such as rapid population growth along coasts and in areas with limited water supplies.” Nevertheless, the authors observe that many activists regard adaptation as being necessary only because we aren’t sufficiently aggressive in preventing greenhouse-gas emissions. And they are completely correct in saying that because “most projected impacts of anthropogenic climate change are marginal increases on already huge losses,” applying adaptation only to that narrow margin makes no sense.

They cite the example of the Philippines, where policy-makers are wringing their hands about a possible gradual climate-change-mediated rise in sea level of 1-3 millimeters per year while ignoring the primary cause of enhanced flood risk. The reason for the rise in sea level: “excessive groundwater extraction, which is lowering the land surface by several centimeters to more than a decimeter [about 4 inches] per year.”

This suggests that instead of spending trillions of dollars on reducing CO2 emissions, more attention should be paid to ways to reduce groundwater extraction, such as desalination, wastewater treatment and recycling, collection of rainwater and the cultivation of crops that require less irrigation.

In a similar vein – and relevant to Gore’s warning about “the spread of deadly diseases” – the authors observe that “non-climate factors are by far the most important drivers of increased risk to tropical disease” although such risk “is repeatedly invoked by climate-mitigation advocates as a key reason to curb emissions.” They cite a study that found that without factoring in the effects of climate change, “the global population at risk from malaria would increase by 100 percent by 2080, whereas the effect of climate change would increase the risk of malaria by at most 7 percent.”

Pielke and his colleagues criticize “the political obsession with the idea that climate risks can be reduced by cutting emissions,” because it “distracts attention” from other, more cost-effective approaches. (They might have added that the economic and humanitarian costs would be astronomical, perhaps unprecedented in history.) However, for many activists, emissions reduction has become an article of faith in the church of radical environmentalism: Gore dismisses adaptation as “a kind of laziness, an arrogant faith in our ability to react in time to save our skins.”

But the examples cited by Pielke and others show that Gore is wrong. Gore-style doctrinaire activism and command-and-control policy-making are inimical to resilience; they jeopardize our survival as individuals and our success as a society. Politicians tend to be short-term thinkers, their purview often limited to the next election, and many of them seem to care less about the public interest than about scoring political points. Moreover, many of them are just not very smart and are particularly challenged in the realms of science and logic.

If, individually and collectively, we are to meet economic, environmental and public health challenges, we need plenty of options and opportunities for innovation – and the wealth to pursue them. In society, as in biology, survival demands adaptation.

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